A small note of relief

As disturbing as this may be, in my research for this I found that the ads in most cases not appear for all first-time visitors to a certain wordpress.com blog, but only to first-time visitors to wordpress.com in general, meaning that the ads will not appear if a visitor goes to a 2nd wordpress.com blog after the first search, or if the visitor any time previously has been to a different blog on wordpress.com. That is, provided that the cookies have not been cleared. In essence, unless you have a blog with a high traffic volume coming from searches with a high number of first time visitors, this should probably not concern you that much.

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I’ve known about the ads for some time, but I’ve never seen anyone of them.

The ads keep WordPress.com free, and they are not visible to regular visitors, so I’m thinking this is an OK way for WordPress.com to keep costs down (I’mguessing they do not make a fortune on this kind of advertising).

There has been some discussion whether or not to allow regular users to ad google ads etc in their blog:

Hi Undre and thanks for your comment. My guess is that WordPress does make a fortune from these, or they wouldn’t be doing it. But as you said, regular visitors will not see them so. And the Adsense discussion enter the forums time and again. here’s a couple of recent threads:

I’m actually very curious about how much money WordPress.com makes. The answer does not seem to be near, but I found this interesting blogpost where the question about money is raised and where Matt Mullweger is quoted and it appears that he also has commented:

I actually find it very nifty that ads are only shown to new visitors (and not even all of them and apparently not to anyone using FireFox).

When I created my blog URL two years ago there were about 340 000 blogs on WordPress.com. These days there are about 3.9 million blogs hosted on WordPress.com. During the last year there has also been upgrades to all the free accounts. Now we have 3 GB of free space for storing uploaded files and images (we used to have as little as 50 megabytes of free space). All of this obviously must cost WordPress.com a fortune, so yes they must make a lot of money on these ads, however I have no clue as to how much they are left with when all costs have been covered. But probably WordPress.com also makes a lot of money on upgrades.